I’m sure to take a lot of heat for this post from other marketers, but the fact is, when designing your social markeing strategy, especially if your time is short, you should have representation on at least one social bookmarking site, 3-4 networking sites, a few blogging sites and one mashup. By blogging sites I don’t necessarily mean Wordpress.com, Blogger, or Yahoo 360 (but they’ll do) – by blogging site I mean any Web 2.0 property that allows you to post content and is Web 2.0 compliant by its very nature.

What Is Considered Web 2.0?

May Include: accepting visitor comments, the utilization and organization of content via tagging, a voting feature, RSS integration or creation, email and/or video capabilities, and so on – anything that is interactive for the visitor.

Choosing which ones to engage for marketing purposes first can be a daunting decision, but you are probably already a member of a few for personal interests, so be sure to add your urls and your feeds, as well as using tags within any network you are already using. And, for the sites that facilitate the strategy, employ my transposting technique explained fully in “Why Your Social Marketing Results Suck.”

As an example – using Facebook to capacity. (1) Update your profile to include your url(s) and tag yourself well (they’re called interests in Facebook). (2) Add your RSS feed(s) through any one or more of the applications created for this. By doing so, your entire friend list is notified within hours of posting new content on your blog – this converts to a lot of traffic if you have a large friend list and engaging content. I have very smart people as my Facebook friends, but when I look at their profiles, their website url is blank and they aren’t sharing their content via RSS! Don’t feel bad if you’ve missed this opportunity, just login now and correct it.

Before setting up new accounts or posting content, be sure to read through “What Actions to Take on Web 2.0 Site for Maximum Effectiveness of a Social Marketing Strategy”

Social Networking

1. FaceBook (Apart from the action points in the link above, actively seek out influential others in your niche or target market and add as a friend, then write something interesting on their wall. Their friends will follow – sometimes without any added effort on your part.)

2. Twitter If you’re in multiple markets, set up multiple accounts and watch the Twitter video.

3. StumbleUpon. Don’t spend hours ’stumbling’, just do the basics and stumble interesting, non-competitive sites as well as your own links.

4. Any “networking” site that does well in the search engines for your target market or keywords. How do you find these? Start at Google with your top level keyword and click through some of the top results. You’re sure to find a few that are ranking well and allow networking. (*A top level keyword would be photography or travel vs. wedding shots or European cruise. So you’d search on google for: review travel, share photos, networking photography, etc.)

Blogging Sites

1. Blogger (because google owns it)*.
2. Squidoo, HubPages or WetPaint (or, whichever blog/content site is doing very well in the search results for your market.)
3. WordPress.com (not a self-hosted WordPress blog, but one hosted by WordPress itself.)*

*You add your own site’s RSS feed on Wordpress (through widgets) and on Blogger (through applications) for regularly updated content that links back to your website.

Social Bookmark

Honestly, any of the big ones will do. Propeller can be fantastic, but Del.icio.us and Reddit are long time favorites for a reason! FeedAgg is hot right now (March 2009).

MashUp

1. FriendFeed – As with Twitter, if you’re in multiple markets set up one FriendFeed account for each. If you’re a busy marketer with many websites, group them together into 2-3 main accounts or you’ll go crazy trying to manage them all. Read all the posts here on FriendFeed.

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